Last chapters for newspapers, TV?

Consider this a prediction about the potentially final staggering steps for newspapers and television, once seemingly impregnable institutions.

The easiest place to start the saga is with squabbling between Time Warner Cable and CBS broadcasting over retransmission fees. Those are the piles of greenbacks cable companies pay every channel from A&E and History channel to Comedy network and CBS to rebroadcast programs or, the trade name, content.

The increasing number of viewers who watch television over the Internet pay far less than we shell out to satellite and cable providers. The result: almost a million households in the past year dumped cable and satellite television. That’s double the rate from the previous year. That’s also lots of greenbacks.

Brief technology history: Remember when families realized they no longer needed telephone land lines? Lots of your friends across the country now use only cell phones. Remember that sentence about watching TV over the Internet? Think about the proliferation of devices that permit video from the Internet. An estimated 32 million consumers now use boxes from Apple, game consoles makers, Blu-ray players and smart TVs from Samsung and LG.

Demographics for smart TV users are predictable: Technically-savvy people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s lead the list. But 73-year-old A-E has a smart Samsung TV that, among other capabilities, alerts him when his boss Neal’s calling. Even A-E, who has the technical sophistication of your cat, easily rides the technology wave.

Netflix and YouTube production companies, among others, create new television content. Imagine a world where Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Google design and sell devices that control the flow of lots of information over the Internet.

Question: What’s the technology identified as the potential Black Plague of newspapers and magazines? The same boogeyman that gives television station owners fits: the Internet.

Most people who work with Amazon-founder Jeff Bazos consider him an opportunistic genius. He’s the guy who bought the Washington Post for entrepreneurial chump change. He hasn’t outlined his plan for taking the Post into the technological promised land but, if he‘s as smart as A-E thinks, the stories of television and newspapers as we know them may have comparable final chapters in large part because of him.

One billionaire renown for investment acumen dissents only slightly from A-E’s pessimistic outlook for the printed word. “I have long told you … that the circulation, advertising and profits of the newspaper industry overall are certain to decline,” Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway Inc. stockholders in his latest annual letter. But, he continued, “I believe that papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly-bound communities … will remain viable for a long time.”

Page 2 of 2 - That statement was remembered after he bought the Roanoke Times in May while hundreds of unappealing broadsheets foundered.

Buffett began his business career at age 14 delivering the Omaha World-Herald. He bought the newspaper in 2011.

What does that mean to A-E’s favorite newspaper? Consider this note from Superjournalist Alan Littell about the $20 million peanuts-profit for multi-billion-dollar New York Times company and the potential for shedding unprofitable ventures. “The Times dumped the Boston Globe; they may also dump the Paris paper (The 125-year-old International Herald tribune). It’s strange, having worked on that great paper, to witness a bit of newspaper history dissolving to dim recollections of people like me.”

Wistful nostalgia may vary among former print journalists but the look forward seems glum and universal.

Two obvious caveats surround this gloomy analysis: Nobody has 20/20 foresight about what’s around the economic bend into terra incognito. Second, you get what you pay for: Nobody paid this retired banker more than the price of today’s Tribune for this assessment.